Pedro's Q&A

Q: How do you make your own soap & deodorant?
Cristina tried this recipe she found online on The magical chart website. The ingredients are lye, water, caustic soda (sodium hydroxide), lavender and olive oil, other essential oils of choice. One batch makes about 20 soaps and the instructions on the website are very good. They're great for the skin, and you can dilute after they are ready to use for laundry and as liquid detergent.
For the deodorant, Cristina uses 2 spoons baking soda, 2 spoons maizena, 1 spoon olive oil mixed together with the fingers until it has a nice texture. Tea tree oil or other essential oil mixed with is even better.

Q: How do you make your own milk and yoghurt?
Well, we have the soya milk machine. it is super simple. We like to make almond milk. You just have to put the cereals you want to make milk from and water, and then you leave it in the machine for 12 minutes. Afterwards it is possible to add flavoring. The soya milk tastes differently than the soya milk bought from the shop, but that is because the milk in the shop has a lot of additional ingredients.
The yoghurt machine comes from Cristina's mother and is over 30 years old. To make soya yoghurt, you just need 1 liter of soya milk and 1 yoghurt to start. You mix yoghurt and milk into the jars and into the machine,  which gives a little heat for the yoghurt cultures to grow. Then afterwards you can add sugar or jam if you want different flavor. 

Q: What books and films on the subject would you recommend?
There is quite a list of good books and films. Of course I read and watch more in Portuguese, but my top recommendations in English are

• No Logo by Naomi Klein
• One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
• The Long Emergency Surviving the end of oil The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler
• Deep Ecology by Bill Devall and George Sessions
• No Impact Man - Colin Beaven
• Noam Chomsky and more

When is about movies/documentaries, some of my favorite include The Corporation, Consuming Kids, The Story of Stuff, The End of Suburbia and Into the Wild.

 Q: When you spent time at an eco-village in Czech Republic, you experienced dry toilets, what do you think about them?
When I first experienced the concept of dry toilets myself, something hit me.Actually this very basic concept of not mixing water and sewage totally works.It is a huge paradox to first pollute water by using it in our toilets and waste streams, and then to have intensive and expensive processes just to try to recover a bit the quality of that same water. Why, when it is possible to skip the water part altogether?
Many times we spend lots of resources in trying to find new technologies when actually a simple concept or a look in a different way can sometimes lead us to better solutions